August 24, 2004 - For more than two weeks, in Sadr City, in Najaf, in Basra and in points in between the Mehdi militia has held out against the combined forces of the American led coalition and the fledgling Iraqi Security Force. The insurgents are armed with small arms, assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades and mortars. For more than a year an insurgency directed at the American led coalition has struck seemingly at will. Sometimes credited to remnants of the Saddamist Sunni regime, sometimes to imported terrorist fighters and most recently to Shi`ite resistance this sustained low intensity warfare has been unremitting. The more than 150,000 allied troops and their indigenous surrogates have seemed powerless to bring an end to the resistant insurgency,

Thousands of Iraqis have been killed; both insurgent fighters and as collateral damage caught in the cross fire. The damage to infrastructure from coalition bomb runs and artillery barrages is uncounted. Even as we spend billions to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure we spend billions more to blow it up and day by day, week by week, the attacks go on and the rank and file of the regiment of the dead fills with new recruits.

For more than a year no one in official Washington has publicly asked who is supplying the insurgency with the supplies and ammunition needed to sustain the conflict. In the early days, shortly after the mission was declared accomplished on May 1, 2003, the idea that the few guerilla fighters were supplying themselves from abandoned Iraqi military supplies was plausible. After more than a year of American occupation that explanation is no longer believable. No one is asking, “Where is the Mehdi Militia’s Ho Chi Minh Trail?” Does it traverse the mountain passes of Iraqi Kurdistan? Does it float up the Tigris-Euphrates Delta? Does it wind through the trackless desert from Syria?

Almost a year ago we were told that American military contractors were hard pressed to supply our army with ammunition. AK47 ammunition is not manufactured in mud hut kitchens. RPG rounds are not put together in spider holes. That ammunition is coming from somewhere and it is not from Saddam’s old ammunition dumps – unless, of course, the year long American occupation has been an ill planned year long utter failure. It is no longer plausible that the insurgency is being re-supplied from within Iraq and no one wants to mention out loud the obvious.

America has bungled its way into a new Vietnam. No one wants to mention that the support for insurgency is flowing from outside Iraq. No one wants to say that Iraqi support for the guerillas is both wide spread and growing.

While the old men repeat the old rhetoric of Vietnam; while the old men repeat the old tactics of Vietnam; while the old men call on us to stay the course headed for the rocks our young men and women are called on to bleed and die. We are going to need a larger fleet of helicopters to get Ambassador Negroponte out of Baghdad than we needed to abandon Saigon.